Contact centers (or call centers) are well known in the art for the purpose, among others, of handling on behalf of organizations large volumes of incoming requests, complaints, queries, etc. from customers or other interested parties (collectively referred to hereinafter as “callers”). While such communications may be received in contact centers via a variety of channels (e.g., email, short message service, post, etc.), a large percentage are often received in the form of voice signals, e.g., telephone calls, placed to the contact center.
Historically, contact centers have recorded their caller interactions for both compliance and quality purposes. Compliance refers to certain legal/regulatory requirements to record calls for verification in the future, e.g., all online financial transactions in a bank could be recorded. In a similar vein, quality refers to those actions need to ensure that contact center agents at least meet minimum standards. Typically, contact centers randomly record approximately 3%-4% of their incoming calls (with the exception of agencies that have to record 100% for compliance purposes). Storage of even this small percentage of calls can be costly, and identifying issues or problems within such stored calls can be like “finding a needle in a haystack”. Additionally, since the analysis of the calls is done after the fact, contact centers lose the opportunity to address problem issues when they occur, i.e., when the customer interaction is taking place. Further still, additional costs are incurred trying to make amends for the problems that have occurred and that are identified—in certain situations, the damage may already be done (e.g., mistrust by the caller has developed, loss of customer loyalty, etc.).
Thus, it would be advantageous to provide techniques that overcome these limitations of the prior art.